In two months, the Do Not Call List will launch across Canada to help prevent telemarketers from spamming your phones. Signing up is simple—you can do it online or by phone—and companies that don't abide will face a serious fine. The service will be operated by Bell Canada, which won a five-year contract earlier this year. Before you leap for joy, know that there is a long list of companies that will be exempt......

In the United States, rising fuel costs have forced airline carriers like Delta and American Airlines to cut both routes and jobs—with executives happily playing the victim by reinforcing the myth of speculation causing higher oil prices. (Speculation actually decreases volatility and the blame for surging prices sits squarely on that boring old idea of supply and demand.) In Canada, two airlines will be cutting jobs: Jazz Air by 270 and its parent company......

On Monday’s edition of Stars & Dogs, BNN personality Kim Parlee wondered if TD Canada Trust’s use of attractive and muscular models armed only with water guns, green briefs, and temporary tattoos of the bank’s logo, was too risqué for the Canadian institution. (Blogs show a mix of support and jeers for the marketing tactic.) It’s an interesting question: where should a company with a market cap of over $51 billion draw the line......

If you have a few million bucks lying around, perhaps you'd consider buying 50% of Ashley MacIsaac's future music revenues? If you like the odds—note that MacIsaac declared bankruptcy in 2000; that his most successful album, released thirteen years ago, sold half a million copies; and that the auction contains the sorta ominous note that "the annuity will expire upon my death"—go for it. But thanks to the Reuters article, which notes that 1.5 million......

As far as quirky names go, This Ain't The Rosedale Library is one of the city's most charming. Following the legendary bookstore's move to Kensington Market after more than two decades on Church Street, someone has amended the declarative moniker on the former storefront to make it even more definitive. Photo by Marc Lostracco.......

This is how today's AY    R arrived at subscribers' doorsteps. The wrap was last year's innovation. The beer "coaster" is a piece of paper stuck on like a post-it note. We wonder what 2009 will bring.......

fuck this grassroots gone corporate This post + this post = this post. Discuss. Photo taken at the northeast corner of Queen and Spadina by Jonathan Goldsbie.......

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. On Wednesday, we took a look at the garbage bins. On Thursday, the advertising pillars. Yesterday, the transit shelters. Today, everything else. (Also check out Karen von Hahn's disparagement of the street furniture in the Globe.) A lot of people who otherwise hate what the Coordinated Street Furniture Program has wrought like the idea of the multi-publication structures......

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. On Wednesday, we took a look at the garbage bins. On Thursday, we looked at the advertising pillars. This morning, the transit shelters. (Be sure also to read Christopher Hume's review, which makes our less-than-kind assessments look like raves.) The "Basic" shelter. (The blue "Toronto" ribbon was present for ceremonial cutting purposes only and is not part of......

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. Torontoist was going to review all of the items at once but decided that some merited their own posts. Yesterday, we took a look at the garbage bins. Today we look at the advertising pillars. Friday, the transit shelters, and on Saturday everything else. (Be sure to read Spacing's coverage, too.) "Isn't two dollars a bit high for......

In the opening voiceover for his Oscar-winning animated short Ryan, Chris Landreth explains, "I live in Toronto, a city in Canada where I see way too many shades of grey for my own good health." This line occurred to us as we attended the official unveiling of Toronto's new "street furniture" at City Hall Monday morning, a celebration of the all-new shades of grey about to trickle onto our streets. Courtesy of Jeremy Kramer......

How many brands does it take to get you through the day? Jane, a pseudonymous Torontonian ad executive, sought to discover just that. She posted the results on her blog, Dear Jane Sample, in what Ad Broad later dubbed a “Brand Timeline Portrait.” It turns out that “portrait” is a surprisingly accurate description of what she ended up with. From Jane’s Brand Timeline Portrait, we discover that Jane is a woman who flosses, who has......

Street artist and former Torontoist contributor Fauxreel (which, contrary to what The Globe and Mail says, is not his real name; it's Dan Bergeron) received both a considerable amount of disdain and a considerable amount of cash recently (as well as some praise), when he designed and helped execute a nationwide corporate vandalism campaign on behalf of a well-known motorized vehicle brand. At the time, Torontoist attempted to contact "Mr. Reel" (as the Globe......

Like it or not, big bad Rogers will be the exclusive provider of Apple's beautiful and magnificent and world-changing iPhone, and as each week goes by it's getting harder and harder to mitigate disgust for the former with adoration for the latter. It was nice, then, to find out that Bell turned their Norm MacDonald–voiced beaver into something truly great: a great big middle finger to Rogers (and Apple). Bell's ad in this week's NOW......

Toronto's urban street furniture collection of late has been messily schizophrenic and oft-criticized, but final prototypes from the Coordinated Street Furniture Program have just been unveiled, with installation slated for 2009. The furniture plan involved a private Request For Proposals (RFP) from three advertising conglomerates, who pitched their designs last year in the hopes of securing the lucrative 20-year monopoly with the City of Toronto. The covenant was awarded to Astral Media, much to......

Yesterday was a tough day for fans of free ice cream. You see, April 29th was Ben and Jerry's Free Cone Day, at participating store locations worldwide. Los Angeles residents, like much of the rest of the world, easily (and, we assume, happily) got theirs. The Ben and Jerry's at 238 Queen Street West, however—Toronto's only downtown store—was closed, with a sign in the window that declared it was "Closed for the season! See you......

One year ago today, City Council's Executive Committee approved [PDF] the awarding of the street furniture contract—for the purposes of designing, building, owning, and maintaining bus shelters, garbage bins, ad pillars, and more for a period of twenty years in exchange for advertising rights—to Astral Media Outdoor, despite the fact that the company had absolutely no experience with "street furniture" and maintains dozens of illegal billboards in defiance of City Council.......

Because nothing says "I'm sorry" like cash in hand, the TTC has just announced a fleet of refunds for all day passes, metropasses, weekly passes, GTA passes. As repentance for that whole surprise strike thing, owners of an adult metropass will get $7.50 back (or $7.00 for those with the Metropass Discount Plan); those with an adult weekly pass will pocket $9.50; and those with a day pass for April 25 will get $3.00 for......

Now, normally our coverage of anything Rogers is best downed with a tall glass of Haterade, but Toronto's technophiles and status-hungry business execs have reason to give thanks today to the Evil Empire, for the most anticipated gadget of the last gazillion years is to finally land in our fair city: Apple's iPhone. In a curt press release this morning, Rogers announced that a deal had been conclusively inked with Apple and the device......

Have you asked yourself recently "Hey, what happened to the "s" in my local Loblaw's sign?" If so, you probably live in Toronto or Collingwood and are curiously attentive to detail. The missing "s" comes as Loblaw Corporation, parent company of Loblaw's grocery chain, tries out a rebrand at three of their stores. Two of the locations are in Toronto, one on Burnamthorpe, and the other at Yonge Street and Yonge Boulevard (between Lawrence......

Well, it sure is classier than the Scotiabank. For one thing, the AMC Yonge & Dundas 24, opening today, isn't called the "Scotiabank." And its interior design scheme (seen above) is premised on the role that movies play in the popular imagination, rather than the role that you play in Taco Bell's quarterly profits. And the music selections playing in the lobby (Soundgarden, Nirvana, and The Who during Tuesday's press preview) don't seem to......

Yesterday afternoon, a group named AlwaysQuestion organized a "day of action" protesting a fee increase for New College residence students at the University of Toronto. The day was to end with a sit-in at Simcoe Hall intended to garner the group a meeting with U of T President David Naylor, to get "the proposed fee increase removed from the University Affairs Board meeting," and to get fifteen minutes at that meeting for a "presentation......

Recently, our own fair U of T released a new and highly controversial study [PDF] that claims men (of all skin colours) are more attracted to women with lighter skin. The story was quickly snapped up by Jezebel, which tied the recent influx in the long-standing demand for "skin lightening creams" in India to the trend. Dr. Shyon Baumann, a sociologist at the University, doesn’t go this far—he asserts that the preference for lighter-skinned......

Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie. According to a December 2004 article in the Globe, Mike Harris is (or at least was at the time) the chairman of video advertising company Onestop; he got on board "in return for an equity stake" in the business. Presuming that he still has that stake (and why wouldn't he? he may be evil, but he's not stupid), Harris became a richer man two weeks ago, when the Toronto Transit......

Plagued by complaints, the City of Toronto has finally gotten around to ticketing some homeowners who don't clear the snow in front of their property. A city spokesperson said they prefer not to send out inspectors in the winter because it's so difficult to get around. Anxious to cement a reputation for self-serving indifference to the public interest, more than 99% of TTC workers have voted more to reject their most recent contract offer.......

It snowed again last night, so if you're going anywhere, it'll probably take you a long time. However, we're getting another storm on the weekend so you might as well wait before you start shovelling. Actually, it'll be spring in a couple of weeks anyway so if you have enough cans of SpaghettiO's, it's probably best to just stay home til then. The Bank of Canada slashed interest rates by fifty basis points yesterday,......

No Country For Old Men cleans up at the Oscars. The Coen Brothers finally got some big-time recognition with nods for best picture, best directing, best adapted screenplay, and best husband of Frances McDormand. In other news, a bunch of Canadians got nominated for stuff and didn't win any of it. (There! We could totally write entertainment news for any major Canadian newspaper now!) Visa IPO expected to be worth nineteen billion smackers. MasterCard responded......

Fire at Queen and Bathurst. Adios to Duke's, the Suspect Video outlet, and a bunch of other cool places. Check out Torontoist's coverage of the fire here and here and here––Queen West will be closed until next week. Home sales in Toronto drop significantly after land tax kicks in. Of course, one has to account for the fact that home sales in January, before the land tax was initiated, were significantly higher because people were......

Snow globes, ice sculptures, and an ice bar...sound like an arctic paradise? Even if you're sick of slipping on the white (and sometimes yellow) stuff, you're still invited to Bloor-Yorkville's IceFest Festival this weekend—and you don't even have to get your feet wet! IceFest ent-ice-s with enough of the cold stuff to carve out a ship—and that's 25,000 pounds! By donating five bucks to the Heart & Stroke Foundation, you buy yourself a pose......

A three hour Blackberry outage affected millions of people across North America yesterday, leading to much wailing and handwringing over the temporary unavailability of a technology that didn't even exist ten years ago. Truly we are a nation of whiners. The Toronto Maple Leafs braved the cold to hold an unannounced outdoor skate at Withrow Park yesterday, where they were cheered on by 300 local grade-schoolers. Following the warmup, the kids formed a pickup......